Political commentary
Trouble at Tvind mill
Ferdinand Mount
What, you may ask, are we doing about the energy crisis? The answer, and we admit it only with the most hesitant and furtive mien, is windmills. The trouble is that, quite unintentionally. Cervantes did windmills a bad turn. With the admirable purpose of discrediting sentimental nonsense about chivalry, he somehow managed, eternally and indelibly, to associate these simple, cheap sources of energy with Don Quixote. It is as though King Canute, another realist, had given a bad name to wave machines instead of, equally undeservedly, to himself.
Windmills are thought of as picturesque, creaky playthings, essentially impractical, quixotic survivals of the old days. 'Windmills,' the man at Harwell's Energy Technology Support Unit said to me in a kind but tired voice, 'may sound very romantic, but have you thought of the environmental impact? Wait until you've had a bloody great windmill falling on top of you.'
Civil servants seem to have an obsession. doubtless Freudian in origin, about windmills failing on top of them. When I asked the man at the Department of Energy about the Americans' giant windmill, he said he thought it had fallen down. Subsequent inquiry suggests that he must have been referring to the big windmill in Vermont which did crack up, but in the 1940s. The new 3-megawatt windmill now being built at Boone, North Carolina, in the Appalachian Mountains by Boeing, Lockheed and NASA is scarcely finished.
I was also told that the Danes were said to be having difficulties with their windmill. But this sounds like another misleading reference, to a machine built by Tvind University students at Ulfborg on the west coast of Jutland. This project has run out of cash, and indeed the machine never did work properly. But the trouble at Tvind Mill has nothing to do with the two orthodox prototype 630-kilowatt windmills being built by the Danish public authorities. The first of these is only this month having its cabin and sails hoisted into place and is going swimmingly so far. The Danes have also had a 200 kw windmill producing electricity for twenty years without trouble.
Yet the British Department of Energy holds to its verdict that 'at present we cannot rate wind-power highly.' Britain's current programme for research into wind energy amounts to only £973,000, but we are spending £5.4 million on wave-power devices and £1.766 million on geothermal research, which so far consists in digging a big hole near Southampton with the intention of sending water down to the centre of the earth to be heated and then pumping it up again. Aha. And who is being impractical now? The Americans are spending £30 million on building windmills this year alone. The Russians plan a network of windmills in the Arctic Circle to produce 4,500 MW by 1990.
Yet Britain has some of the most favourable winds in the world, far more suitable for windmills than those in the United States. True, these giant windmills do roar and if scattered in a random pattern on the available hilltops, which tend to be in national parks and suchlike, would further infest the landscape with access roads and pylons. For that reason, windmill enthusiasts are all agreed that they must be sited offshore in shallow waters such as the Wash where they can be grouped in logical clusters and share a common link to the national grid. Clustering is clearly an ancient practice; Don Quixote caught sight of 'some thirty or forty windmills which stand on that plain'. What he mistook for an army of giants was in fact an industrial complex — like Billingham or Scunthorpe.
You don't need any fresh technological principle to build a wind machine. The Central Electricity Generating Board knows how to link cables to the Grid. The North Sea oil rig experts know how to build platforms in far deeper waters and rougher weather than would be needed for windmills. Dr Peter Musgrove of Reading University calculates that offshore windmills could meet more than a fifth of the UK's demand for electricity at a marginal cost certainly comparable with and perhaps much better than that of electricity generated by a cOal-fired generating station. Compared with this, some estimates suggest that wave machines would produce electricity costing forty orfifty times present levels.
I don't suggest that total apathy reigns in Britain. Part of the government's programme involves a joint feasibility study for a huge 3.7 MW hilltop windmill carried out in conjunction with British Aerospace (the Hawker Siddeley bit), Cleveland Bridge Engineering, Taylor Woodrow, the Electrical Research Association and the Scottish Electricity Boards. But why this slow and sceptical approach, such a contrast with the millions blithely spilled on wave machines and the Great Hole of Southampton? Our rivals are already building their wind machines and we have scarcely started thinking about offshore windmills yet. One of the Harwell windmill people gives the game away: 'A lot more was known about wind energy and its potential from the old Ministry of Supply research programme between 1948 and 1958. We are in an advanced technical position and so we move more cautiously' (my italics). With a new technology, he thought, they tended to spend more to verify its possibilities, to test the claims made for it. The more we know, the less we do.
The guiding impetus was scientific, the testing of a new principle, rather than commercial, the production of a saleable article. Windmills — even if you call them 'aerogenerators' — were simply not exciting enough. Far from being romantic, for stimulus-hungry scientific minds they were not nearly as romantic as 'harnessing the tides' or 'piercing the earth's core.' Mr Adrian Berry of the Daily Telegraph, one of the most exuberantly romantic of all writers of science, says: 'Let us dispense with windmills. The human race has grown out of them.' Mr Berry is acting as second to Sir Fred Hoyle in one of those Hoyle v Ryle punch.' ups which so divert the layman. Sir Martin Ryle is terrified of nuclear power and wants windmills everywhere instead; Sir Fred is scornful of windmills and infatuated with nuclear power. Any old Sancho Panza can see that both sides are exaggerating wildly. After all our postwar failures to applY new technology profitably, Britain still seems fatally addicted to a kind of technological snobbery. Even where economy and not scientific advance is supposed to be the prime motive — as it is at the Harwell energy unit — there is still an instinctive preference for plumbing the unknown rather than exploiting the known. It is those who opt automatically for the most esoteric and arduous answer who are the true Quixotes, most notable among them Tony Benn' the last energy minister, who must be assumed to have had something to do with his department's order of priorities for research. There would, however, be nothing easier than for the incoming government to double Mr Benn's niggardly allowance 90 windmills. So far in the energy crisis, Mr David Howell, the new Secretary of State, has been marvellously restrained. He has not ordered 'massive energy co-ordination programmes' or promised a 'crisis crackdown on profiteers' or resorted to any of the other gimmicks usually employed by politicians who wish to appear to be doing something. There are in practice only three things that could be done to deal with the impending shortage of oil. First, to put the price — which with luck Sir Geoffrey win do in next week's Budget by at least 5p 3 gallon. Second, to protest on every concei.v" able occasion against the lunatic oil: guzzling of the Americans, as Mr HoWeil has already done in the case of President Carter's latest folly — an actual subsidy 0° diesel and home heating oil, which will suck in still more supplies from the rest of the world. And third, to spend more money °11, the development of alternative sources o_l energy — of which the aerogenerator is by 111 means the most unpromising. There, Y° see, we can be as judicious as any bureattcrat; the windmills of the mind are whirling quite nicely in this department.
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